Performance of BICM-T transceivers over Gaussian mixture noise channels

Experimental measurements have shown that the noise in many communication channels is non-Gaussian. Bit interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is very popular for spectrally efficient transmission. Recent results have shown that the performance of BICM using convolutional codes in non-fading channels can be significantly improved if the coded bits are not interleaved at all. This particular BICM design is called BICM trivial (BICM-T). In this paper, we analyze the performance of a generalized BICM-T design for communication over Gaussian mixture noise (GMN) channels. The results disclose that for an optimal bit error rate (BER) performance, the use of an interleaver in BICM for GMN channels depends upon the strength of the impulsive noise components in the Gaussian mixture. The results presented for 16-QAM show that the BICM-T can result in gains up to 1.5 dB for a target BER of 10^-6 if the impulsive noise in the Gaussian mixture is below a certain threshold level. The simulation results verify the tightness of developed union bound (UB) on BER performance.